January 2017

Rural areas have been left in the dust when it comes to staying up to speed in the digital age. Thirty-nine percent of rural Americans and 41 percent of tribal lands lack access to basic 25 Mpbs broadband service. Compare those numbers to only 4 percent of urban residents. To address this rural/urban digital divide, we recently hosted a webinar on “Partnerships and Rural Broadband Needs”. We have also crafted the Rural American Broadband Connectivity (Rural ABC) Program for the Trump Administration.

With rumors of an infrastructure bill in the works, the School Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition is preparing to participate actively in these debates. Please let us know if you would like to join our Coalition and support our advocacy for open, affordable, high-capacity broadband for anchor institutions and their communities. Together we can bring our rural communities up to speed.

Public Knowledge joins six public interest groups in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) urging Congress to oppose three bills targeting consumer protections in the digital age. The bills, the Midnight Rules Review Act (HR 21), the Regulation from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act (HR 26) and the Regulatory Accountability Act (HR 5), would upend longstanding and fundamental structures of federal administrative law. Taken together, they would broadly paralyze multiple expert agencies’ ability to enforce the law, which is especially dangerous in the media and communications sector. Such changes could increase prices, undermine citizens’ health and safety, and even endanger the nation’s communications network.

Kate Forscey, government affairs associate counsel at Public Knowledge, said, "“All Americans rely on modern communications technologies in their day-to day lives and deserve ready and able watchdogs to protect us from corporate abuses like sneaky fees and unexpected data overages, as well as ensuring privacy protections and the reliability of the network, especially in emergencies. These bills would strip consumers of important safeguards that go unnoticed precisely because they have been so effective in protecting people for generations. In a world of ever-increasing consolidation of media power in the hands of two or three companies, these safeguards remain essential to the continued functioning of our democracy and society.

The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) has joined with five dozen other journalism associations and outlets to ask President-elect Donald Trump to make commitments to transparency and not punishing reporters, commitments they say were not forthcoming from the Obama Administration. Trump has already cut off access to reporters and outlets whose stories he did not like, so he could be a tough audience. But the outlets were looking for commitments from the new administration to do better than his predecessor in that and other regards.

The groups said their priorities for re-opening the discussion about transparency and access are: "The ability of reporters to directly interact with government employees who are subject matter experts, rather than interacting with Public Information Officers (or having all conversations monitored by PIOs); access to the activities of the President; and ensuring that the Federal Freedom of Information Act remains as strong as possible."

C-SPAN said that an "internal routing error" was responsible for Russia Today suddenly taking over C-SPAN's online video feed. The company said that it had completed and internal investigation, and said that the mistake happened while it was testing for inauguration coverage. "C-SPAN has concluded its investigation and as we had anticipated last Thursday, the interruption of our C-SPAN.org livestream on January 12th was caused by an internal routing error," the statement reads. "C-SPAN.org was not hacked. We have determined that during testing for inaugural coverage, RT's signal was mistakenly routed onto the primary encoder feeding C-SPAN1's signal to the internet, rather than to an unused backup."